NVIDIA's Detonator 4 Drivers: Free Performance

GeForce3

The GeForce3 does extremely well under Quake III Arena and the Detonator 4 drivers give it a little boost at the lower resolutions.  The real improvement comes at the higher resolutions where the GeForce3 is finally becoming memory bandwidth limited.  At 1280 x 1024 x 32 the Detonator 4 drivers offer a 25% increase in performance and at 1600 x 1200 the drivers increase performance by 29%.

The new drivers allow you to run at 1600 x 1200 x 32, with all of the detail settings turned all the way up, at over 100 fps – very impressive.

AquaMark is the only DirectX 8 test that we have which actually takes advantage of the GeForce3’s Pixel Shaders.  It is clear that the improvements to the DirectX side of the drivers are taking effect as there is a 28% increase in performance at 640 x 480 x 32.  The performance increase continues all the way up to 1600 x 1200 where the advantage is reduced slightly to “only” 17%. 

Since the game just recently came out we thought we’d include Max Payne as a benchmark for those of you that haven’t gotten tired with the game yet.  The biggest improvements once again come at the higher resolutions.  The Detonator 4 drivers buy you another 15% at 1280 x 1024 and 19% at 1600 x 1200.